The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine
Alina Bronsky
Language: English
Pages: 262
ISBN: 160945006X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously nasty and wily narrator of this rollicking family saga from the author of Broken Glass Park When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, “stupid Sulfia,” is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa’s surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother’s eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.
Told with sly humor and an anthropologist’s eye for detail, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic. In her new novel, Russian-born Alina Bronsky gives readers a moving portrait of the devious limits of the will to survive.
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times men spontaneously handed me bouquets of flowers on the street. I ate pastries at cafés more often than I had ever before in my entire life. I could leave my wallet at home with confidence. Strange men paid for me at cafés, on the bus, and in grocery stores, saying it would be their pleasure. I couldn’t have them all. That just wouldn’t work. I didn’t want to have them all anyway. But even among those I wanted in theory, I couldn’t have them all. I still had to work, eat, sleep, and call
“A better cat you will not find,” said the man conspiratorially in Aminat’s ear. He had leaned way down to her. I could tell Aminat was doing her best not to show her disgust at the smell of his breath. “You’re not getting this one, Aminat,” I said from a few steps away. “Then I don’t want one at all,” she said. “But look at all the beautiful cats here.” “I want this one.” “We can try to find one like it,” I said. I made clear my strong opposition, but she just shook her head. “This one.”
come to nothing. Sulfia had a few female friends on our block, but the last time she had spoken to a boy was probably ten years before, just after she started primary school. Yet, one day, there I was sautéing a fish in oil (it was 1978, and anthrax spores had just leaked from the huge lab in our city), and Sulfia put her hand over her nose and then threw up four times in the toilet. Even that witch Klavdia, who lived in another room of our communal apartment, noticed something amiss. Klavdia
difficult to decipher. I looked in the medicine cabinet, saw who got what and how much, and filed away all the information in my head. I have a good memory and an astute understanding. I spent all morning at the hospital. After I’d gone through all the rooms I’d be sent to change the sheets or take care of some mess or other that had happened during the course of the morning. I also pushed patients down to the OR if the nurses were too busy. Some of the patients were scared before their
kept. Then came the first time that a patient fresh from surgery was moaning in pain and I couldn’t find anyone to help her. I went and got the right little vials and added them to her IV drip. I watched over her for a while to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake and that she didn’t die. A day and a half later her husband picked her up and she walked out leaning on his arm. At home I chatted with Dieter about the medical histories of the women in my ward. I called it “my ward” and also soon